The Professor of Truth (31 page)

She picked up her tin, but it was empty, as mine had been for a while. This seemed to bring her to some kind of decision, and she stood up.

“We don’t have much time here, do we?” she said. “To help each other. So we should try to help each other in the time we have. Don’t you think?”

“You and me?” I asked, standing too, and feeling again my wounded feet.

“I don’t mean that. I mean here, in this life. We don’t have much time. We should be kind to each other.”

I didn’t have any answer. She said, “Come now. We’ll get some more beer and you can take it in to Martin. Maybe now it can be over.”

She went ahead of me. As I followed, I remembered the jute bag and its contents. It seemed days ago since I had dropped it on the floor, but it was still there. I bent to retrieve it.

“You won’t need that,” Kim said. She had turned and was watching me.

“I might.”

“No, you won’t,” she said. She did not mean the bag, she meant the recorder. I realised this as I felt inside for it and found that it wasn’t there.

I was about to protest, but her look told me that there was no point.

“Just go,” she said. “Just talk to each other.”

FELT LIKE A STUDENT OUTSIDE HIS TUTOR’S ROOM
, about to deliver an essay or have one returned. Kim had brought me to the upper level of the house, pointed to the door, and gone back downstairs. I held two tins of beer, cold offerings that I felt uncomfortable about bringing, yet I had not resisted when she took them from the fridge and put them into my hands.

I did not think I would be able to knock at the man’s door, but then I saw that it was ajar, not shut tight. I pushed it open.

A standard lamp was switched on but it did not cast a strong light. The room occupied the southeast corner of the building, with one window facing out over the garden and another across the ridge towards the sea. They were big windows, and the southern one opened on to a balcony overlooking the swimming pool. The night sky was moonless, deep and dark and vast, and scattered with stars. There seemed even more of them from this height than from the ground. Closer to the horizon the sky was hazier, and streaked with the pink and orange of fires still burning some distance away.

Martin Parroulet was sitting in an armchair to one side of the balcony window. He was still in the shorts and T-shirt he’d stripped down to when he went looking for the cat. The
lamplight seemed to separate his thin receding hair from his skull. His left leg, the one he’d been limping on, was stretched out, with the foot resting on a stool. Going towards him and looking down on the balding head, I thought that we must be about the same age. This had never occurred to me before. I had always thought of him as an older man.

Parroulet did not move but he knew I had come in and he did not seem surprised that I was there. He said, very quietly, “Open them over there. Do not give fear to the cat.”

The cat was settled against his chest and belly. Its head was up, its eyes alert, as if it might bolt at any moment. Parroulet’s right hand cradled the cat’s hindquarters. The hand was huge, the hand of a peasant or of the son of a peasant. This too was something I had not previously noticed.

The tins of beer gave fierce little hisses when I opened them. The cat’s ears pricked up but it stayed where it was. I approached again and Parroulet put out his left hand and took one of the tins, but did not drink from it.

Opposite Parroulet’s armchair was an upright wooden chair with a loose cushion. I wondered if the chair had been placed there deliberately for me, and if so who had placed it. I sat down and took a drink.

Neither of us spoke. The meaty index finger of Parroulet’s hand stroked the cat’s fur. His eyes were fixed on me all the time. He seemed wary. The cat too watched me. It could have been a scene from a bad film.

A minute passed. A minute of silence in such circumstances is a very long time. At last Parroulet sipped from his tin of beer.

“You come with the fire,” he said. “You go with the fire.”

“The fire is gone already,” I said.

“You want me to thank you? For you help save my house? I’m not sure to thank you. Maybe you bring the fire.”

“You think I started it?”

Parroulet shrugged. “No. Not start it. But if you don’t come, fire don’t come. Not one without other. Maybe.”

“I’d have come anyway.”

Parroulet lapsed into silence again. He had a big, broad nose and in these moments his breathing was the loudest, almost the only, sound in the room.

“Who send you?” he asked.

“An American. He knew where you were.”

“How? Nobody know this. What is his name?”

“Ted Nilsen.”

“I don’t know this name. Who is he?”

“An agent. CIA probably. That was not his real name. He knew all about you.”

“He is spy?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say he was. He is dead now.”

“Dead? Who kill him?”

“Nobody. He died of natural causes.” But as I said this I realised that I did not know it for sure. “Bad health and bad weather,” I said.

The corners of Parroulet’s already downcast mouth fell further, as if to signify scepticism.

“He died in a snowstorm,” I said.

“When?”

“A week ago. Just after he told me about you, and where to find you.”

“If he know all about me, what is it more you want?”

“I want the truth, Mr Parroulet.”

“That is not my name. My name is Parr.”

I said, “Please don’t treat me like a fool.”

He said nothing. I felt my patience fraying. Be calm, I told myself, this is what you are here for.

“My name is Alan Tealing. You are Martin Parroulet. You gave evidence against Khalil Khazar. Your evidence convicted him. If you would admit that what you said was made up, manufactured, so it could be shown that Khazar should not have been found guilty, then the police would have to reopen the case. They would have to start looking again for who really murdered my wife and daughter.”

I remembered something else about Parroulet as I said all this. Parroulet’s spoken English had never been good in court, but his comprehension had been fine. There had been a simultaneous translation service available but he had not made use of it, and during cross-examination he had very seldom asked for a question to be repeated. And so I did not think that Parroulet would be easily confused by the conditional clauses and mixed tenses I had used, even if he pretended to be. I certainly did not intend to make what I had to say easier for him.

There was another thing. For nearly a week now the details of the Case had hardly been present in my consciousness. I had worried that I might not know what to say if this
encounter ever took place. And now it was happening, and it was all still there, the motivation, the memories, and I did not need to worry. Kim was right. We just needed to talk.

Parroulet said, “Khalil Khazar is dead. This spy you speak of, this Nilsen, is dead. Nothing can be done.”

“Yes it can,” I said.

“Your wife is dead. Your child is dead.” Parroulet bowed his head, and made some soft pacifying sound to the cat before he looked at me again. “I am sorry for saying this. Nothing can be done.”

“You are not dead,” I said. “I am not dead.”

Parroulet concentrated on stroking the cat.

“Kim is not dead,” I said.

The cat stretched, more at ease. Two white patches in the dim light showed the bandages on its front paws.

“Did you ever have a child?”

Parroulet shook his head. “No.”

“Did you never want children?”

The thin-haired head shook again.

“What good is this? Why you are ask this questions?”

“Because I have to. Did you?”

There was another long silence. Eventually Parroulet gave a kind of groan. “Yes. But it is not possible.”

“How not possible?”

“Kim.”

“What about Kim?”

Another groan. “She cannot have child. Something happen when she is child herself. Very bad things happen to her in Vietnam.”

“She told me about some of them.”

Parroulet’s scowl deepened.

“When I went to her shop, we talked. She talked about her family.”

“You know all about my wife? So talk to her. Why you want talk to me? I know nothing.”

“What do you think happened to her? Something physical?”

Parroulet shrugged. “She keep some things in herself. Maybe physical, yes. Or maybe in her head. You see bad things, maybe it get in your head, change your body. She have some problem with the eggs. The doctors give her check and say she can maybe get treatment, but she don’t want treatment. She always say if it happen it happen, but it never happen.”

“She told me about her father being taken by the pirates, and the pirates killing her brother on the boat. She told me about her mother. And her sister, and what happened to her.”

Parroulet said, “What happen to who?”

“Her older sister. The one who died. Her mother and her sister were raped. She didn’t say so but that’s what she meant.”

Parroulet shook his head. “There was mother and father and brother. I think there was not sister.”

I was about to contradict him, but he seemed quite definite.

“I think there was not sister,” he repeated. “Yes, she has tell me this sometime. And the sister dies. But sometime
she tell me different. It is her they rape. It is terrible time for her. Long ago, when she is child.”

He looked as if he expected me to say something, but I could not speak.

“When she say one thing or other thing, it is not lie,” he went on. “It is very bad memory. You understand?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“So we never have child,” Parroulet said. “What I am to do, leave her? Because she can’t have baby? No, I don’t leave her. She is my wife.”

He drank from his tin.

“You ask this questions that hurt. Why?”

“Because if you knew,” I began, but that wasn’t right. “Because if I could tell you. What it feels like, to be a father. And then not to be. To have that taken from you.”

“I am sorry,” Parroulet said. “For you, I am sorry, okay? You lose your child. So I did also but in a different way. For me it is nothing, you say. You cannot lose child you never have. But it is not nothing. And for Kim too. She never lose child but it is not nothing. She lose all her children when she was child herself.”

“My child—” I wanted to say something about Alice losing everything, every chance and possibility of her life—but he spoke again.

“Do you believe in the God?”

Not another one, I thought. “No,” I said. “God
is
dead.”

To my surprise, he nodded vigorously. “God, yes. Yes, he is dead. But for me not so long ago. For long time I do not think this. When I am little boy, even young man, I believe
in him. He is alive then. On the island, he is very big, very strong, you understand? It is not possible in my family there to think God is dead. So when I think this things, I keep them in myself. I come here, after the trial, and I meet with Kim, and God goes away some place. Good, I like this. Then Kim can’t have baby, and I think maybe he is still there, in the dark. He is punish me. What for he is punish me? Because I tell lie? No, I don’t tell lie. Because I take money? Yes, because I take money, like Judas.”

He drank some more beer, apparently marshalling his thoughts. Was this, I wondered, the prelude to a confession? Or did he really have nothing to confess? I thought of the recorder that Kim had confiscated. If only I had it, if only it were switched on and running. Yet if it were I thought Parroulet would somehow sense it and not speak at all. There was no logic behind this notion, but I could not dispel it.

“When I am young man,” Parroulet said, “I want to get away from island. Always I want to leave. What life is it, driving taxi all your days? My father is driver, so I am driver. It is a job, that is all. You put down money to get a car, then you work to own it. You make some money but never enough, then you trade in for other car, and you work to own this new car, so your life goes. Round and round, you never can get off, like a machine, okay? And the island, it is small, you drive the same roads every day, always back to the same place. Round and round. You can’t ever get off the island. I feel this but I can do nothing. This is my life.”

“There are worse lives,” I said.

“A man has his life, that is all. If there is worse or better, what does he know of that?” Parroulet stared at me, as if seeing me anew. “You think I come to this trial without history,” he said. “You think I am little actor on stage. I come on, I say lines, I go away. You think only you have history. Then if I say lines you don’t like, you say no, those are wrong lines. Why? Because they don’t fit your history. Well, I have history too. I bring it with me to the courtroom.”

“I know you did,” I said.

“No, you don’t know it. You say it but you don’t know it. One man don’t know another man. You don’t know me, I don’t know you. It is impossible.”

“Is it?” At that moment, I did not think I could disagree.

“What is it you do to live, to eat?” he asked.

“I work in a university. I teach.”